Claude Levi-Strauss 1908 – 2009

Claude Levi-Strauss was a French anthropologist and philosopher and the founder of structural anthropology. Influenced by Roman Jakobson's structural linguistics and his own field experience among the indigenous peoples of Brazil, he developed a method that sought to identify the unconscious logical structures underlying kinship systems, totemism, and myth. His Elementary Structures of Kinship, the four-volume Mythologiques, and the celebrated memoir Tristes Tropiques made him one of the most influential French intellectuals of the twentieth century. His work shaped the broader structuralist movement in philosophy, literary criticism, and the social sciences.

Claude Levi-Strauss was born in 1908 at Brussels into a French Jewish family of artists. He took the agregation in philosophy at the Sorbonne in 1931, taught briefly in a lycee, and accepted in 1935 a post in sociology at the new University of Sao Paulo, from which he undertook the Brazilian fieldwork among the Bororo, Caduveo, Nambikwara, and Tupi-Kawahib that became the basis of his career. Driven from France in 1941 by the Vichy laws, he spent the war years at the New School in New York, where his encounter with Roman Jakobson was decisive.

Returning to France he held posts at the Musee de l'Homme, the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes, and from 1959 the chair of social anthropology at the College de France. His major works are The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949), Tristes Tropiques (1955), Structural Anthropology (1958, 1973), Totemism (1962), The Savage Mind (1962), the four-volume Mythologiques (1964-1971), and the late The View from Afar and The Story of Lynx.

Levi-Strauss applied Saussurean structural linguistics to the analysis of kinship systems, totemic classifications, and the millions of pages of Amerindian myth, arguing that the human mind operates everywhere through binary oppositions and their permutations. The most influential anthropologist of the twentieth century, he shaped French structuralism and the wider mid-century human sciences. He died in Paris in October 2009 at the age of one hundred.